If ever your Costa Mesa Thanksgiving preparations cause you to go online seeking some Thanksgiving-related recipe, it will be hard to resist one of the sites that will probably pop up: the Smithsonian Institute’s “14 Fun Facts About Turkeys.”
There are several new turkey insights among the 14. And when it comes to one assumption about the first Thanksgiving that’s probably shared by most everyone in Costa Mesa, Fun Fact #4 is there to correct the record.
Most of the details of that first Thanksgiving aren’t in question. The Pilgrims had survived the ordeal of the journey and had bonded with the helpful native Americans. So after the first successful harvest, everybody thought it was time for a joint celebration as a neighborhood kind of thing.
Huntington Beach real estate has greatly benefitted from one offshoot of “virtual” technology. Just click on a listing’s “virtual tour” button and a progression of two-dimensional views of the listed property parade across your laptop or smartphone screen.
Those Huntington Beach listing virtual tours are real estate’s first step toward “VR”—Virtual Reality. VR isthe more immersive version that allows viewers to move around within three-dimensional renderings of computer-generated environments. A current example is the TV commercials depicting delighted VR goggle-wearers experiencing animated fictional worlds. They demonstrate two things: 1) the people who don the goggles look as if they truly do feel as if they are surrounded by a
When it comes to appraising and developing appropriate responses to offers on your Huntington Beach home, I’m there to offer counsel and guidance. Even so, you are the ultimate decision maker. Especially for Huntington Beach homeowners without previous selling experience, becoming familiar with some practical pointers for home selling negotiations is well worth doing. Huntington Beach sellers can find one rich source at the National Association of Realtors® web site. This month’s World Series finale undoubtedly inspired the title for a list of home selling negotiation pitfalls. Published the morning of Houston’s Game 7 victory, it dealt with errors in home selling negotiations. It was subtitled “Negotiation Hardball Fouls.”
Halloween in Fountain Valley is the one day in every year when the regular order of things gets a thorough shaking up. For one thing, it’s the single day of the year when we expect our doorbell to be ringing non-stop for hours on end. It’s certainly the only time when prudence dictates that we stockpile bowls full of treats to serve as ransom payments against demands for booty from an onslaught of pint-sized masked neighbors.
For Fountain Valley’s small fry, if all goes well, Fountain Valley’s Halloween ranks right up there with birthdays in terms of fun and excitement—possibly because of the aura of good-natured bounds-testing that seems to hover over the proceedings. When else does everybody get to dress up in disguises? When else might
More than half of U.S. homeowners expect their home’s value to rise in the coming year. For Costa Mesa real estate watchers who track public sentiment as a market indicator, the news comes as a welcome addition to other reports of rising consumer optimism regarding the economy as a whole.
The finding comes from a national telephone and online survey conducted earlier this month by the Rasmussen Reports organization. It signals an acceleration in a year-long trend of rising expectations among U.S. homeowners. A year earlier, fewer than 40% had predicted that their own home values would rise in the coming year. In this latest report, that number has increased to 53%—a leap of 12% over the March finding. According to Rasmussen summary, this
Amazon has invaded the realm of real estate—but you couldn’t say it’s happening in a big way.
It’s happening in a tiny way.
Last week the improbable news arrived that the web’s 400-pound gorilla had made its first foray into the realm of real estate. Since Newport Beach real estate (like all real estate) is by definition local, its very nature would seem to preclude the buying and selling of homes as a mail order enterprise. But since Amazon.com has succeeded in other industries where failure had been assumed (high-end fashion, for instance), could local Newport Beach real estate soon be monopolized by a tsunami of Amazon Prime home sales? At least it warranted some looking into!
It turned out that Newport Beach real estate was not likely to
My organization—the National Association of Realtors®—offers a wide range of guidance for Fountain Valley families who have decided it’s time to land their first house. With more than a century’s worth of experience, you’d expect nothing less.
Last week I happened across an article the NAR had distilled that looked like a must-read for anyone who is just starting out on the path to buying their first Fountain Valley house. Its title was “8 Critical Things to Do Before Buying a Home”—but it could just as well have been “8 Critical Things to Do Before Buying Your First Fountain Valley House.” Each of the eight was apt—and important to mull over—but it’s the kind of list that’s awfully easy to read without giving much thought to the individual
Ask a typical Huntington Beach consumer to name the two most important purchases people make, and you’ll almost always hear “new house” and “new car.” They’re often lumped together, but they shouldn’t be. They aren’t all that similar.
The rationale for buying a new car is clear: automotive technology advances nearly every model year, improving fuel economy and safety. Add in that intoxicating new car smell, and the preference is all but automatic. Used cars may be economical, but as for the thrill factor: nyah!
Similarly, when the question is put to a cross-section of typical Americans, new homes get the nod over existing ones. The percentage of those who “strongly” or “somewhat” prefer buying a newly built home weighs in at
Ask a typical Newport Beach consumer to name the two most important purchases people make, and you’ll almost always hear “new house” and “new car.” They’re often lumped together, but they shouldn’t be. They aren’t all that similar.
The rationale for buying a new car is clear: automotive technology advances nearly every model year, improving fuel economy and safety. Add in that intoxicating new car smell, and the preference is all but automatic. Used cars may be economical, but as for the thrill factor: nyah!
Similarly, when the question is put to a cross-section of typical Americans, new homes get the nod over existing ones. The percentage of those who “strongly” or “somewhat” prefer buying a newly built home weighs in at 41%. That’s a
When news of the Equifax hack first broke, the credit ratings giant scrambled to minimize fallout from this massive personal information breach. After an initial embarrassing misstep (they tried to have affected consumers sign off on Equifax’s liability), the company moved to ameliorate the hack by offering free ID protection to consumers.
Costa Mesa homeowners and potential home buyers had reason to do more than shake their heads at yet another electronic pratfall. In one way or another, most Costa Mesa real estate transactions involve creditworthiness appraisals that are managed by the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax is one). That means that among the 143 million consumers it admits could be “potentially impacted” are certainly a lot
